The Verge, reporting that Microsoft lost almost a billion dollars with Surface RT, in this quarter alone. "At the end of the day, though, it looks like Microsoft just made too many Surface RT tablets - we heard late last year that Microsoft was building three to five million Surface RT tablets in the fourth quarter, and we also heard that Microsoft had only sold about one million of those tablets in March." That's catastrophically bad.

"Okay. Enlighten me. How else does one guarantee that the boot loader and the kernel haven't been modified prior to boot?"

There are many possible mechanisms. However let me clarify that it's not really the secure boot mechanism that is controversial so much as the policy of keeping owners out of the chain of control over hardware we supposedly own. With x86 thankfully we won the fight as owners to keep control over our hardware's security features. With ARM, this battle is ongoing.

Secure boot is already such a mechanism, obviously there are other ways to authenticate the system startup code. But like I said the controversy isn't over the security mechanism itself, so long as owners are ultimately in control over the security mechanism then I'm happy with it. If you really think owners shouldn't have control over their own hardware (aka windows rt), then I'm afraid that you and I are never going to agree.